How do I know what Keywords my Site pages are ranked for?

[stanbeck]

All,

I have a site called http://Kitten-Pictures.com and I've been agressively trying to get ranked for the keyword phrase "kitten pictures".

However, in an effort to get more higher dollar adsense links on my site, I've been writing articles and posting them on my site that are related to cats, but no necessarily "kitten pictures".

Is there a way to do a generic query, in Google, let's say, that will show what keywords a page is ranked for?

If I type a search in Google of "http://kitten-pictures.com", my site shows up -- doesn't that mean I've been indexed?

But, I don't know what keywords they have ranked me for. Am I making sense?

Thanks,

Stan

http://kitten-pictures.com

[TheRealLifeGuy]

All,

I have a site called http://Kitten-Pictures.com and I've been agressively trying to get ranked for the keyword phrase "kitten pictures".

However, in an effort to get more higher dollar adsense links on my site, I've been writing articles and posting them on my site that are related to cats, but no necessarily "kitten pictures".

Is there a way to do a generic query, in Google, let's say, that will show what keywords a page is ranked for?

well i can think of doing a search for that term directly, but if u want to start from the page itself - and then ask what keywords that page is ranked for... (which is what i'm assuming u're asking??), then i'm not sure...



If I type a search in Google of "http://kitten-pictures.com", my site shows up -- doesn't that mean I've been indexed?

yes!! u'll be able to see various links to more info about what google has collected about ur site. Try it out!!



But, I don't know what keywords they have ranked me for. Am I making sense?

yeah, u make cents, whoops, i mean, sense. :D dont worry

ps. i've just taken a look at ur site - really do love it!! Awwww... :p

[Chris]

Yeah you can see what keyowrds you rank for, just go to Google sitemaps, you install a little HTML file on your root directory to prove that you are the site owner then Google will give you a list of all teh keywords and the rankings you have for both impression and click throughs - this is extremely useful for SEO IMHO. I use it to find keywords that I may not have optimised my site for but am actually ranking just outside the top 10 in Google for, they you slip a couple of those keywords in your content, and even headers and titles if possible and you normally see a nice little jump into the top 10 with a corresponding nice little jump in your traffic, it's actually amazing to see all the keywords your site ranks for that you would otherwise have no idea it did - even when you are writting your own content with specific keywords in mind!

As for your rankings in Google, it appears that Google has indexed your - or atleast your homepage, but it's not seeing any backlinks which will mean that your site won't be viewed by Google as wrothy of ranking. I had a look in MSN and you have 70 odd backlinks which means you obviously have a few links out there but I'd highly recommend building your backlinks so that Google takes your new site a little more seriously, then you might see your site jump into the SERPs, because at the moment your site wouldn't consistantly rank for any terms I'd imagine.

[TheRealLifeGuy]

Sorry, Chris, i've got some questions - hope u dont mind helping out.

Yeah you can see what keyowrds you rank for, just go to Google sitemaps, you install a little HTML file on your root directory to prove that you are the site owner then Google will give you a list of all teh keywords and the rankings you have for both impression and click throughs - this is extremely useful for SEO IMHO.

are u referring to the "Query Stats"? If so, that seems to be only for the search terms that people use. And during the last three weeks at that. So ie. even if i were to be ranked for "success", but nobody happened to search for it... I wont see in the stats. That what u're referring to? How about info past 3 weeks? (I know that those keywords may not be worth anything much... but, I'm just a guy for the details).

As for your rankings in Google, it appears that Google has indexed your - or atleast your homepage, but it's not seeing any backlinks which will mean that your site won't be viewed by Google as wrothy of ranking. I had a look in MSN and you have 70 odd backlinks which means you obviously have a few links out there but I'd highly recommend building your backlinks so that Google takes your new site a little more seriously, then you might see your site jump into the SERPs, because at the moment your site wouldn't consistantly rank for any terms I'd imagine.

Wow, i didnt know that! This is good info...

[Chris]

Sorry, Chris, i've got some questions - hope u dont mind helping out.No I don't mind, I'm always happy to answer the questions that I can when I have time. That said my knowledge is far from conrehensive and shouldn't be taken as gospel, just my opinion and what I have noticed and read.

are u referring to the "Query Stats"? If so, that seems to be only for the search terms that people use. And during the last three weeks at that. So ie. even if i were to be ranked for "success", but nobody happened to search for it... I wont see in the stats. That what u're referring to? How about info past 3 weeks? (I know that those keywords may not be worth anything much... but, I'm just a guy for the details).Well for me I don't really care if my sites ranks for the term "Widgets" if no one in the world is searching for "widgets" if you know what I mean. At the end of the day I'm aiming to gain as much "relevant" traffic to my site as possible. So if my site is about "widgets" in general and ranks 1st for "big wigdets" but no one in world is searching for big widgets then I'm not going to optimise my site for the term "big widgets" but if a million people are searching for "small widgets" and my site is ranked 15th... then this is obviously something I should look into, well at least that is what I'd do, and at the end of the day winning at the Adsense game is all about traffic regardless of world's greatest optimisation techniques and strategies without traffic your site will earn nothing.

As for old data... well no there isn't a lot you can do about that, but Google does offer you the ability to download the keyword data to be viewed in excel so if you are into seeing where your site is in comparision to a few months ago just download the new data every so often.


Wow, i didnt know that! This is good info...Backlinks are essential these days to be ranked in all of the search engines, the more you have the more important a SE thinks your site is, and whilst I have no real experimental proof, I'm of the belief that building quality and most importantly relevent backlinks to your site will get you indexed in Google much faster! Again that is just my experience.

[brian@my-affiliate-progra]

I used to pay for a service that offered tons of info on "search referral" and it was very helpful. However I decided to just use hosting that offers "cpanel" simply because most of the time you will find several good stats packages that will show you referral info like:


top search terms for the month
all search terms used for the whole month
referring sites (other than search engines)


These all can be found under "awstats", other stats are also located under "recent visitors" which is very helpful as you can see the latest visitors that have accessed your site, and also where they came from.

I found this to be an awesome tool for finding new popular terms that people are using to find my site. Once I find some of these terms I simply create pages on my blog (or even create blog categories in wordpress) for these types of terms.

If you don't have cpanel check with your host for any free "stats packages" that they have set up for ya.

[sgllocal]

yeh i agree brian i alos run have my own hosting with cpanelx etc as i find the stats are very good and my customers are also happy with cpanelx and their hosting packages i offered them. the thing i like with awstats is that it does show how your site was found and which terms were used etc. then u can build from this. :-)

[aaanativearts]

If your host doesn't offer a comprehensive stats package, get another host, there are plenty of them who offer this kind of information for free, included in your hosting package, and they don't have to be expensive hosting, either.

If you look at the search terms people are using to find your site, and you are getting some traffic off those searches, you probably have a page ranking somewhere for that search term, but if the traffic is low, you probably don't rank very well. Then you can use that information to refine that page so it will rank higher and bring you even more traffic. Or if you don't already have a page optimized for a search term you see in your stats but hadn't thought of, you can now build a page around that keyword.

There is a site called http://www.urltrends.com where you can look up your domain name and see what keywords it's ranking for in the major search engines and whether or not it's listed in DMOZ and how many back links it has from each of the major search engines. If it doesn't have any listings initially, or the keywords you are interested in, you can add the keywords you are interested in, and eventually it will show you your rankings for those keywords after it updates the next time. You can track up to 10 domains at a time for free, and they update their findings monthly. If you pay a fee you can track unlimited domains, depending on the plan you choose, and they will update your stats weekly instead of monthly. You can track your competitor's urls or your own or a combination, and sign up for reports to be emailed to you when something changes.

[aaanativearts]

If you want to rank for the term "kitten pictures" then you will have to build some article pages that are optimized specifically for that phrase. It doesn't matter if it's your index page or another page that is getting indexed, as long as something on the domain is ranking high enough to be found by a lot of people. I assume your article pages all have a link to your home page, so they will get there eventually.

It's been my experience that my index pages seldom rank high for my primary keyword phrase, (unless they are designed to be a selling page and focus on just one thing) because they have so many links and article blurbs to multiple related subjects that they don't rank so well for one narrow niche.

My highest rankings are always at the article level. On my dog-breeds site, I want to be ranked for not only "dog breeds" but every kind of dog I can think of. So I must build one or more articles for each dog breed or combination of keywords I can think of to describe a kind of dog I want to rank for: poodle dogs, poodle breeds, minature poodle, standard poodle, rat terriers, jack russel terriers, jack russel terrier puppies, puppies, etc as well as dog breeds. If you are clever you can, and probably should rank under multiple keywords from each article you post, although at different levels of rank.

Since your domain name is kitten-pictures, I would expect you to have some kitten pictures. Name your kitten pictures with that phrase in the name, for example persian-kitten-picture.jpg and be sure to use an alt tag on each one describing them as some kind of kitten picture. If possible, also have text on your page near where the kitten picture is used that uses the words "kitten picture." Then store those images in the root directory of your domain and they should soon get picked up by the Google Images search for that keyword. You can get a lot of traffic that way.

It's true the traffic coming from image searches is usually low quality that are more interested in stealing a picture than visiting your site, but a certain percentage of image searchers will visit your site and may click on something. At any rate, what you make from the traffic will usually exceed your bandwidth expenses if you do it correctly. When you are first starting out, at least this gets you some traffic rather quickly while you are building your articles up.

Since Google now practices stemming, a search for "cat" should also bring up pages that contain the words "cats" and "kitten" and vice versa, altho they will rank at different levels for each keyword. So if you are writing an article focused on cats, also use the word kitten at least once on that page to possibly get traffic from both. As long as you don't overdo it, the page should still rank well for the primary keyword of "cat."

Did you know you can now tag the portions of your pages with google ads to tell google what part is most relevant to the type of ads you wish to receive?

Just put a comment tag at the beginning of the most relevant text that says <!--google_ad_section_start --> and at the end of the relevant text put another comment tag that says <!--google_ad_section_end --> You can even have multiple relevant sections on the same page if you want to use more than one. So, for example if my page is about "Apache Indians" I can put those tags around that keyword phrase, then google won't give me ads related to Apache web servers but will know the page is about Indians, not servers.

[flwong]

hi all the gurus,

i am a totally newbie in the seo, can you guys tell me and show me how do i do the backlink to my site. i read some ebook in oreder to get high ranking by search engine your site must have many backlink, but how do i do it. please help me please.:confused:

thanks a million

cheers.